NN sat where she was, bruised and apathetic. She felt that she had lost all hope of controlling Chako Lyllac, now that he was hot on the trail of her father's gold.
Hearing him come running out of the shack, she sharply turned her head. He had come for wood. He gathered up a store he had laid ready beside the fire, and ran into the shack again.
Ann could not bring herself to approach the place. She watched. Presently, by the light that sprang up inside, she knew he had built a fire to give light for his search for the gold.
By and by he came out. Ann saw at a glance that he had found nothing. He had himself better in hand, but his voice was still strained with excitement.
“Of course the old fox wouldn't leave it around in plain view,” he said. “I'll find it to-morrow!”
Having put off his satisfaction until the morning, Chako set about spreading his blankets. Ann knew that he would be asleep almost as soon as he lay down. She crept away under her tent.
She lay there, too crushed to feel any active pain; but such was the weight on her breast that it was hard to breathe. She was no longer tormented by maddening thoughts. She lay quiet enough.
“All that gold!” she said to herself. “It is mine, and he will never forgive me for it. He is lost, and so am I!”
Sleep was out of the question for her. She rolled up one of the sides of her little tent, and tied it. Sitting up, she saw Chako a little way off, rolled up in his blanket, a formless bundle by the fire, with one shoulder sticking up.
His pose suggested an utter callousness. She turned away her head. This was not Chako, she thought—not the man she loved, but a wicked changeling.
She looked out over the lake. It was a moonlight night, but the moon was not high enough to look down into that deep bowl. The sky was a sea of gray light, out of which a few stars, like pin points, glimmered wanly. The moon was somewhere behind the great mountain up whose flanks they had climbed the day before. The vast, blunt summit was outlined against the pale sky, black as the shadow of doom. The peak at the other end of the lake—the gold peak—was bathed in a heavenly, tender radiance.
It was all too grand, too tremendous. What business had puny humans amid such surroundings? Down in the bottom of the bowl the lake slept in a black and awful stillness, through which the sound of falling water came like the rolling of a drum. When Ann came out of her tent in the morning, Chako was already at work. He had unceremoniously pitched all Joe Maury's poor belongings outside the shack, and was grubbing about within.
She set about making a fire as well as she could. Chako had never allowed her to do this before. After several attempts, she got it started, and prepared the breakfast. When it was ready, she called Chako, but he paid no attention, and she sat down to eat alone.
Suddenly he came running out of the shack with his eyes blazing. There was a visible change for the worse in his face. His expression had become brutalized.
“Two hundred pounds of gold!” he cried.
To Ann it was like the cry of a madman.
“Have you found it?” she asked with sinking heart.
“No,” he said, “but that's the amount of it! Joe Grouser kept a tally on the back of the door. He shaved the poles down to give himself a clean place to write on. So many ounces a day—sometimes four, sometimes six, sometimes ten. It totals more than two hundred pounds. Now I know it's here!”
Ann's breast experienced a sort of jaded thrill. Two hundred pounds of gold was a fortune. She had a momentary glimpse of what it would buy; but she could not get excited over it. She looked at Chako's changed face, and hated the gold.
“You take it pretty cool,” Chako said, with a hard glance of suspicion. “Maybe you knew it was here.”
Ann shrugged.
“Did you know it was here?” he demanded, with an evil look.
“That's a foolish question!” Ann cried, exasperated. “How could I expect to get it out of here without letting you know about it? Could I hide two hundred pounds in my clothes?”
Chako, however, was deaf to reason. He continued to glance at her darkly.
Having bolted some food, he jumped up and recommenced his search. Having exhausted the possibilities of the shack, he searched outside it, striding back and forth across the little clearing and under the trees, searching every inch of the ground for some evidences of its surface having been disturbed.